“During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we’ve ever been in – and which we lost – every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.” -Kurt Vonnegut

Take the money and run

Nobody in this goddamned world has ever heard the term “preventative” I swear to God.

You don’t brush your teeth when you start getting cavities. You brush to prevent them.

You don’t install seatbelts after you’ve been ejected from your car. You get a car that already has seatbelts and airbags.

Vaccines, healthy foods, routine hardware maintenance (cars, computers, etc), exercise and stretches… You’re supposed to do and get things BEFORE you have the problems they solve.

We really really need to get into the habit, as a species, of trying to prevent bad things before they happen.

I know that fascist morons are taking over America but won’t somebody PLEASE think of the Teslas!

This person got so so close to the real answer as to why most software today sucks.

Money.

Capitalism.

Line go up - Forever.

It’s the systems we choose to live in, not the leaders who take advantage of them.

Really cool software has been coming out all the time for the last decade or so, and then the second it goes public and starts trading stocks, it immediately starts going south. A company, making cool stuff I love, goes public, and I know to immediately start grieving for its death. Money makes all creative endeavors so so much worse. And I truly believe software is a creative pursuit. It’s been hijacked by capitalists to automate every living being on this planet out of work. Right now the list of people truly put out on their ass for good by automation isn’t very big. But we’re accelerating very quickly to a future where nothing fun ever happens again. Useful, functional, problem solving software, from now until forever, will be made and used to kick your ass, stomp you into the dirt, and sell your stupid crying face to anybody who wants to purchase it. Then while we’re at it, it’ll take the things you love to do and do them for you. And then make you pay money just to see it.

If you want to see and participate in some of the most unique and amazing uses of software engineering in our time, there are so many open source projects that achieve incredible and fun things for absolutely $0

• Video Game Randomizers
  • And their decomp partners
• Mod Communities
• Free Digital Art Programs
• Open up Github, sort by most Starred projects, and just fuckin scroll until you can’t scroll anymore
  • And even this has been captured. Code made freely for everyone to use, instead being fed to machine learning bullshit. To what end? To fully replace the need for any human to ever write software ever again.

It’s endless. There are truly too many projects for me to list in one post. I’d spend weeks editing this comment, adding all the coolest things software has done for us and can do for us. But it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. I am 100% confident society and its leaders will abuse the good will, passion, and creativity of many a programmer from now until the end of my life. It’ll do that to every profession. As long as we cling to the idea that we only do work to make profits, as long as the only way we can survive is by making money, this will be our fate.

You can’t logically argue your way out of bigotry. They don’t care whether they’re actually correct or not about trans issues. They already wanted to harm us and remove us from society where possible, and will find any reason to do so. See: the bathroom debates.

I’d rather people just stood up for us at all than act like they need to make good points in order for us to exist. You’re all playing kickball and we’re the ball.

Wanna dogpile onto this comment to add that we can’t even automate robots to mow lawns by themselves. The ones you can buy that do any part of the job well at all require GPS, and also require manual intervention or remote piloting for even getting the bot back to its charging station. I work for a corporation that automates machinery like this and sells it to the US government, which advertises its products as automated or crewless, but actually requires somebody at the helm of a software suite to manually adjust and operate the bots at any given moment during their operations. How the hell are people expecting cars and planes to automatically get you to your destination? Imagine your “crewless” vehicle being piloted by some dude in an office somewhere in your country instead of someone actually being at the wheel. Does that make any kind of sense? Would you trust the delay in instructions? What happens when your vehicle can’t receive any outside connections?

Some level of complex “Autonomous” everything, from now until the foreseeable future, will always have a human in the pilot seat. 100% automation is impossible for us right now with our current level of technology.

The reason is more than just that the last few % points of automating is the most difficult hurdle, though I really agree with that part. It’s that automation can’t account for improvising, adapting, innovating. Automation can’t do on-demand problem solving. Space probes on the Moon and Mars can’t unflip themselves when they get stuck. Programmed machines can only do what they’re programmed to do. We’re beyond anything somewhat complex getting 100% automated any time soon.

Accounting? Helpdesk support? Labor that is repetitive and doesn’t require much ingenuity will get automated fast.

Heavy machinery? Art? Transportation? Medical care? We’re 100+ years a way from completely unmanned complex tasks. People eat up the sci-fi marketing garbage without really interacting with or testing the claims being made.

This made me start uncontrollably weeping. Not for the performances by the trans representatives, but because all I have been seeing for the last 8 years is a downward spiral of our dehumanization. Then to see this number of Republican reps change their vote in a really unexpected place… This was really important. All we can hope for is that they don’t backslide. I don’t dare hope that this means any of their hearts have truly changed.

I’m an eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeegirl

The thing about Death Stranding I wanted to see more of had nothing to do with its core gameplay, but actually the side mechanic of being able to build things that other players could use. Like, we all love Dark Souls messages and how entertaining and sometimes helpful those can be. But there was something incredible about the design of being able to build a bridge that other players in other single-player games could also use. That was really special. The rest was kinda pretentious garbage and more-movie-than-game.

Capitalism

There are too many people on the Internet (and likely also generally the world) who don’t know how successful sex strikes have historically been, and it shows.

I’m not a therapist or any variety of professional on the topic. I will tell you it sounds unhelpful to remove emotions. I know there are similar practices in things like Stoicism. But many people take those practices to extremes. You don’t sound like you’re doing anything like 100% extreme about emotional suppression but you are probably overdoing it like 80% extreme. If that makes sense.

Emotions are useful. They’re informational reactions to the world around us. I’m an extremely emotional person (big happies, big mads, big sads, etc) and sometimes letting that loose is a huge problem. I can make myself physically sick if I don’t regulate my emotions and reactions. But I learned and practiced how to feel my emotions and then let them pass, rather than trying to stomp them out entirely. Which never really works. Suppression just pushes the problems to your future self. It’s not a relief or release.

So I guess I’m trying to say, you’re not at all wrong for what you’re trying to accomplish. But I think you’re probably not going to succeed or improve (in the way that you want) going about it the way you have been. I’d recommend finding counselors who understand how to teach effective emotional regulation techniques, or practice meditation.

I think I’m about to take liberties with the term “strategic play.” But I’ll tell this regardless.

I have a friend who is only hyper competitive when playing games, especially board games. In the moment, he wants to win so badly that he will do anything to win. He manipulates, gaslights, he’s dangerously intelligent and he’s good at making it seem like he’s just playing casually. And then once the game is over? He doesn’t care at all whether he won or lost. It’s infuriating sometimes.

Thanks to also being an extremely competitive person, I saw through it pretty quickly the first few games I ever played with him. But nobody else does. It seemed like nobody ever tried to win by comparison. So when he and I are in the same game, I know I’m going to lose. And he’ll use the other people at the table even if I can see it happening. Even if I made comments about it mid-game, nobody would believe me.

So I got petty. I couldn’t beat him at the manipulation game. Instead, I turned him into a meme. When he ever looked like he was behind, and someone noticed, I’d say in a light-hearted conspiratorial way, “[his name] is always ahead.” Repeated it whenever he would take the lead and eventually when he won the game. “You see? [His name] is always ahead.”

It caught like wildfire. Our other friends started using the catchphrase, even in games where I wasn’t there. People started using attack cards on him more often. They’d be less friendly with him about trading. People would snub him even when he was so far behind there was no catching up. The day I realized how much it got to him, was one day he told me how much that phrase impacted his ability to play games with friends. It ruined a lot of his fun. Sometimes new friends who didn’t even play with us that often would use it. I didn’t realize how much damage it caused. All I wanted was for people to be more wary of his manipulation tactics. But instead I took something fun from a good friend and made it miserable.

So I haven’t said it for years since. But our other friends still remember and will say the phrase from time to time. He’s always ahead.

I’m the only girl

Literally moved everything to Linux (Nobara) like 3 weeks ago and the only thing I can’t get to work is Bizhawk which I can easily get around. It’s insane how far Linux has come for gaming and whatnot.

Git gud scrub

I’ve attempted to submit PRs to open source projects for most of my career and it’s such a fuckin nightmare. 99% of the time I’m just trying to patch a bug. I get:

• Ignored for months and eventually rejected without reason
• Repeated pushback on whether the fix is necessary
• Snarky feedback
• I have had multiple occasions where one of the regular maintainers copied my code to a new branch and PR, then merged my changes under only their name, instead of sending me review comments or collaborating on edits

Open source is often not open contribution. The reason why open source projects die isn’t because nobody is contributing. It’s because project owners usually kinda suck. It’s like contributing to StackExchange. IDK if it’s just that programmers tend to be contentious assholes or what.

Edit: Don’t get me started on abandonware. I don’t know if anyone uses FoundryVTT but module creators tend to abandon their software and never update it again, forcing people to fork it just to maintain the project through new versions

Everyone I need to talk to is in my contacts. If you’re not in my contacts, my phone doesn’t even ring. You go straight to voicemail.

I was fine with phone calls when I was younger. Now it’s mostly spam robocalls or scammers or both. Nobody seems interested in solving those problems.

The Dead Internet conspiracy theory was written with total crackpot paranoid thinking about ruling elites, likely antisemitic undertones, and general tinfoil hat reasoning about AI. Plus generative language models were nowhere near advanced or skilled enough at the time the conspiracy was purported to be happening.

But it was accidentally prophetic in at least two ways by 2024:

1. Corporations have completely strangled online social spaces to the point that most people only visit about 1 to 3 of them, and
2. Online discourse in those social spaces has been absolutely captured and manipulated by multiple governments trying to manipulate other countries and stir them into pointless ragebait frenzies.

It wasn’t due to the illuminati, the Jews, or anything weird and bigoted conspiracies of old have traditionally blamed. It was thanks to billionaires, corporate and government espionage, AI grifters, and unregulated scammer networks (digital currency counts too) jumping onto the same technology at the same time and ruining everything on the Internet in similar ways.